Painting 05

Painting 05

Work created in 2025/10/18

This work is an interactive internet artwork that instantly transforms any video captured by a webcam into a 'painting' and then generates music from the resulting visual information — an experiential piece built upon a double transformation process. What matters is not what the camera captures. It may be the viewer’s face, a corner of a room, or the scenery outside a window.
The captured image is vertically stretched through glitch processing, transforming into an abstract picture with pixel-sorting-like effects. What makes this transformation essential is that, regardless of the original subject, it renders everything equally ‘painterly.’ The wooden wall, the light source, and the accidental passerby before the camera are all filtered through the same algorithm, reduced to a combination of vertical textures and organic lines. This stands in direct opposition to the ‘decisive moment’ in photography. Here, the essence of the work lies not in what is captured but in how it is transformed.
The piece resonates intriguingly with John Cage’s concept of chance music. Just as Cage used the I Ching to compose, this work employs the webcam as a device of chance. Yet, the crucial difference lies in how randomness and determinism are nested within each other. What the camera captures is random, but once the image is recorded, everything that follows proceeds deterministically. The color ratio of the image (33% warm tones, 33% cool tones) is analyzed, complexity (0.9) is computed, and these parameters are converted into a breakbeat at BPM 155, using the D Dorian scale with an eight-note sequence.
The detailed log displayed on the console—23 melody notes on the left channel, 128 bass notes on the right, 80 kick beats, and 200 hi-hats—reveals the precision of this conversion process. The viewer witnesses, in numerical form, the moment when chance is transfigured into necessity.
As its title, ‘Evolution System,’ suggests, the generated music is not a static artifact. It changes, grows, and mutates over time. This continuous transformation is an attempt to compensate through sound for the temporality that painting inherently lacks. The paradox of motion emerging from stillness lies at the heart of the work’s allure: an image freezes a moment while the music derived from it unfolds through time. This juxtaposition of visual singularity and auditory continuity shapes the tension at the core of the piece.
The technical logs displayed on the left side of the screen—lines such as ‘Neutral Dorian scale selected’ or ‘Dynamic tempo calculation: base 155, final 155’—are not mere data but form part of the artwork’s critical center. They lay bare the thought process of the algorithm itself, constituting an intentional resistance to the black-box nature of digital processes. In an era overflowing with generative and AI art, the capacity to explain ‘why’ something emerges as it does becomes increasingly vital. This work incorporates that explainability as a fundamental aesthetic element.
The strength of the piece lies in its impartiality: in the openness of allowing anything to be seen and the strictness of treating everything with equal rigor once captured. This contradiction creates a unique tension. Viewers may choose what to show the camera, but they cannot fully control what kind of music will result. This limited agency symbolizes the human condition within contemporary algorithmic culture.
Furthermore, though bearing the name ‘painting,’ the work is, in essence, a computational transformation process. This contradiction in naming speaks to the fluidity of artistic genres in the digital era. The distinctions between painting, music, and video no longer hold; all are understood as forms of data transformation.
Ultimately, the work questions the relationship between seeing and hearing. Can the visual truly be converted into the auditory? And if so, is that conversion arbitrary, or does it contain some deeper truth? No answer is offered. The system simply continues to operate—continuing to generate music.